Alan Philps

Starting as a trainee for Reuters in Moscow in 1979, Alan worked as a foreign correspondent for more than 20 years, covering wars and political upheaval in the world’s trouble spots. He has built up an unrivalled knowledge of Russia, having witnessed such seminal events as the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, the failed putsch which brought Boris Yeltsin to power in 1991, and the bloody fighting in Chechnya and the rise of bandit capitalism in the mid-1990s.Alan was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1985, but was allowed back to Moscow after the collapse of communism.

After a hectic decade with Reuters, he moved in 1990 to The Sunday Correspondent, a UK weekly publication, and then to The Daily Telegraph, the leading British broadsheet, where he worked as Moscow correspondent (1994-98) and Middle East Correspondent (1998-2003), ending up as foreign editor (2003-2006).

He is currently working as London-based Associate Editor of The National, a new English-language newspaper published in the UAE, while contributing articles on Russian and Middle Eastern themes to a variety of outlets, including the Guardian, the Evening Standard and the First Post. Alan studied Arabic and Persian at Oxford University, and speaks fluent Russian and French. His first book, The Boy From Baby House 10, was published in 2010.

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Vanya is bright, inquisitive four-year-old with tousled black curls and a permanent grin. He doesn’t know what the sun is. But Vanya is not stupid. He has not been beyond the four bare walls of his dormitory in a Russian orphanage for two years. During his time in the orphanage Vanya is neglected – starved of love, nourishment and stimulation. Finally, he is sent to an asylum – an underworld where children are left naked on a bare cots for 24 hours a day. But no matter what abuses he endured, Vanya’s spirit was unquenchable. He never stopped reaching out to the people around him: other children he saw were giving up, the carers he inspired to fight the inexorable cruelty of the Soviet system and at last, across an ocean to the woman who would become his mother. Vanya’s capacity for love saved his life, against all the odds.